SO WHAT ARE your plans for today, Mom?” Jane asked. She hadn’t slept well and her mother was up early, brewing coffee, and bustling around.
“Um. I have some meetings at the charity office.”
“On Sunday?” She kept her voice neutral. The meeting, she knew, was with Kevin.
“Yes, well, that’s when people could meet,” she said vaguely. “My donors tend to be extremely busy. How about you?”
“I’m going to make a video forgiving Mrs. Hall and post it to Faceplace.”
“Oh, I think that’s a bad idea, darling.”
“Forgiveness is a bad idea?”
“Look, she’s finally getting a taste of what real blame feels like. Let her taste it. Have you read the comments on her page? I wonder sometimes who these people are, who have all the spare time to hate on a stranger. We know that feeling.” She bit into her toast.
Jane stared at her. “I think you wrote several times about forgiveness on the mom blog.”
“I did, but that was more about forgiving one’s self.”
“You’re good at that.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing, Mom.”
“I’m so glad you’re home.” She tried a smile.
“Adam has a roommate now. So I might be back on the street.”
“No, you’ll stay here.”
She tested her mother. “I don’t like being next door to the Halls.”
“You are not going back on the streets, Jane. We’ll find a different solution. I’ll get you an apartment.”
“You will? You said I had to either be in school or here.”
“Well, I was wrong. I won’t have you in that situation anymore.”
“Thanks, Mom.” She wasn’t sure if she could believe this new promise.
“But don’t make that video. It’s a bad idea. At least not now.”
Jane didn’t say any more.
“How do breakfast tacos sound? I’ll run over to the Baconery and get us some.”
“Wonderful,” Jane said.
Her mother left and Jane went straight to Laurel’s computer. She awoke it and it asked for a password. She slid the hacker flash drive into the port. The windows for the various programs opened. She selected the PasswordCracker; it asked for information such as pet names, anniversaries and birthdays of family members, streets one lived on, and other common denominators of passwords. She entered all that and within two minutes the password was cracked. She went to her mother’s e-mail application. Her mother had a home address; one for the charity; and a couple of others, spares Jane supposed, that she didn’t seem to use much.
She searched for “Cal.” She found old e-mails, from before and after her dad died, but nothing romantic. Many offers of help and solace from the Halls after Brent’s death. Nothing suspicious. She searched for “Perri”—more of the same. She found a few e-mail exchanges after the crash, pleas that Jane tell what happened, angry e-mails doubting her amnesia, rejections of Laurel’s pleas to publicly forgive Jane. Those were hard to read. And then nothing.
She went to the charity e-mails, paged through them. Notes to Laurel’s assistant, drafts of e-mails soliciting funds. A note to a bank about an unusual deposit, her mother had to fill out some paperwork. It had been a large overseas donation.
Jane skipped to the accounts she hadn’t seen before. They looked mostly like spam; perhaps these were the accounts her mom used when shopping online or enrolling in a loyalty program. But there were several from banks overseas, and they recorded deposits and withdrawals. Like the spreadsheets she’d seen in her father’s file she’d taken from Randy Franklin. She even recognized some of the abbreviated names: HFK, Alpha. Those had been entries in the spreadsheets.
Were the spreadsheets in her father’s file not her dad’s at all but her mother’s? Why?
She printed out a couple of the bank e-mails, folded them, and tucked them into her jeans pocket.
She went back to the search window and searched for “Jane.”
She found two recent e-mail threads. The first was with a private mental hospital just outside Austin. Questions, arrangements, discussions about whether or not it was the proper place for Jane. How the involuntary-commitment process would work, if that was the path she chose to pursue.
She means to lock you up. Or she did.
And then the second batch of e-mails, all variations found in a drafts folder. She read them, her heart hammering in her chest:
As you know I wrote the Blossoming Laurel: Modern Mom blog for many years, being one of the top five parenting blogs for an extended amount of time, generating both substantial advertising revenue and readership. I wrote primarily about the challenges of raising my daughter Jane (while running a successful charity) and then later about the tragic loss of my husband, Brent. I am proposing a new book project, dealing with my daughter’s traumatic accident and resulting amnesia, the crash investigation and how it made us pariahs in our small tight-knit suburban hometown. I especially wish to focus on the way amnesia patients are ignored by our medical system and how my daughter Jane was reduced to living on the streets (against my wishes), my difficult decision to commit her to a mental facility…
Jane closed her eyes. Her life, her problems, the current disaster, were fodder for her mother’s career, still. And she was writing like the commitment had already happened. Like it was just a chapter. The same way she had treated the rest of Jane’s life. She Internet-searched the intended recipient’s name: it was a top literary agent in New York.
She went to her mother’s browser and went through the history. Many views of the video of Perri attacking Jane. Searches for names like Brenda Hobson, Shiloh Rooke, Amari Bowman, Randy Franklin…but all from the week before.
Had her mother been building a list? Jane had never checked if her mother had an alibi for the night when Brenda Hobson’s home burned.
It couldn’t be. Her mother. But…if those spreadsheets her father had been investigating belonged to her mother…
She thought of the odd code written in her father’s file: R34D2FT97S. She had written it and the other odd numbers in the file down on a piece of paper in her wallet. She entered the number into the search window for the computer. Nothing. She entered it into a browser search window. Nothing.
Then she noticed the two entries under the long code. U: and P:, each with their own entry. Username and password? Typical log-in requirements if it was a website. Maybe the long code was a website address. She copied R34D2FT97S into the address line for the browser, added the usual “.com.”
The browser jumped to a clean black page. A message on the page read, You are not authorized for access from this system. Thank you.
It was a website, but it couldn’t be accessed. No way here to enter the username and the password. What did that mean? What was it? It wasn’t the kind of website address a person would enter, just looking to see what it was. It made her uneasy.
She heard her mother enter through the garage door. Jane wiped the browser history, yanked the drive from the port, and put the computer to sleep. The stray bits of the world she knew had been shredded, and she forced a smile to her face as she walked into the kitchen. Her mother unloaded the foil-wrapped tacos.
“Hungry, darling?”
“Yes, Mom.” She sounded subservient, but for the moment that was the role to play. She had to figure out a way out, a place to go where her mother couldn’t find her and stick her in a padded room.
She needed a weapon with which to fight back. A secret to stop her mother cold. And if her mother was Liv Danger…she needed a way to put a stop to this now, before someone else got hurt. She didn’t want to call the police on her own mother.
They ate and then she went upstairs to text Trevor. She had changed her plans.